Comments on: What’s going on with seamless.usgs.gov ?

By: anonymous

anonymous — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 19:29:43 +0000

Regarding comment 4: “I say fire them all and contract it out.”

It’s already been done. Many of the staff behind the seamless surver ARE contractors.

By: JP

JP — Thu, 18 May 2006 14:59:29 +0000

How can you not blame USGS? They installed the untested patch. And they have been down for another two weeks.
It seems to me, anytime we ever patch we always test the patches in the development/test env first.
And shame on USGS for running microsoft products, thats the other half of the problem. Why would they not be using an opensource WMS server under some flavor of *nix escapes me. Why change all the layer names?

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 10 May 2006 21:33:25 +0000

Don’t blame the USGS, blame Microsoft. Sounds like this was because of one of their new security patches that they were forced to install:

http://igskmncnwb010.cr.usgs.gov/website/lidar/bb/index.php?showtopic=87

By: JP @ backcountrymaps.com

JP @ backcountrymaps.com — Thu, 04 May 2006 21:32:38 +0000

Sorry for another comment. But in addition they have changed all the layer names to ATLAS_XX_XX and ATLAS_XX_XX_LABELS
FYI

By: JP @ backcountrymaps.com

JP @ backcountrymaps.com — Thu, 04 May 2006 21:30:48 +0000

I agree, I notice outages from USGS and Terraserver-usa.com at least once a week. I work for the government (different area but similar) and we would be hung out to dry if our data uptime wasn’t 99.9%. At least they are providing this service, and I’ve gotten by constently updating my users as to the USGS WMS/Layer server status.

By: GIS User

GIS User — Thu, 04 May 2006 04:41:31 +0000

So I go to http://gisdata.usgs.net and the links to Elevation data take me to the Seamless server! So what is the point of going to http://gisdata.usgs.net anyways?

I got the seamless server to come up but the map doesn’t come up and it is soooooo very slow. The new server must be an 80806 or something.

I would be embarassed if I worked at the USGS but these people don’t care. They just want their paycheck every two weeks. And if anything
involves more than an hour of work per day… Forget about it. I think there is something deeper here below the surface that we don’t know about
going on at the USGS. First LandSat7 goes down now this. I say fire them all and contract it out.

I mean this mapping application should not be so difficult given it has not changed substantially in the 9 or so years it has been around.

Also this will be a boom to private companies selling map data.

By: Dissident

Dissident — Sun, 30 Apr 2006 01:50:37 +0000

With budgets getting tighter and tighter, at least we can look overseas with a warm feeling watching all our money getting spent on that splendid war. Election day is right around the corner–time to get some people in Congress with a backbone and a brain.

By: Dave Smith

Dave Smith — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 19:25:42 +0000

As federal budgets get tighter and tighter in the civilian sector, we will see a lot of things coming out, good, bad and otherwise - one thing to keep your eye on will be the Geospatial Line of Business effort coming out of the President’s Executive Office, which will strive to consolidate geospatial efforts across agencies. I think what we are seeing at USGS may be symptomatic of bigger issues. My concern is in what we may end up losing as a result.

By: Dylan

Dylan — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 18:09:24 +0000

interesting. i have noticed that the last few downloads that I have requested have been delivered as ZIP archives which expanded to garbage files. I noticed this behaviour with mulitple web browsers across 3 (!) operating systems… very strange indeed.